The Railway Accident and other stories by Edward Upward

Author:Edward Upward [Upward, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Enitharmon Press
Published: 2014-04-03T23:00:00+00:00

The shock for Esther was very great, although its full effect was held back by the pressure of all the things she had to do now, immediately and during the following week, and without any help from the one person she would most naturally have turned to in a time of disaster, Maurice himself. She did get support, however, from her friend Margery, especially when arrangements had to be made with the undertaker and the rector for the funeral. In spite of arthritis which was more severe than Esther’s yet was, Margery came over to the hamlet each day before the funeral and stayed at the station house for several days and nights after it to help with the shopping and cooking and to keep Esther company in the evening. But eventually Esther was alone there, except for the two cats, and her grief came fully into its own.

Perhaps only the cats, and the necessity of feeding them, made her take the trouble to go on preparing meals for herself also, though her thoughts and feelings were about Maurice and hardly at all about the cooking or eating or anything else she had to continue doing now. To have been able to talk about him with someone who had known him really well might have given her comfort, but none of their surviving old friends had been in good enough health to come down for the funeral, and their father and mother were dead and so were all their other relatives except for their cousins who lived in Australia. Yet she could get some comfort from talking about him in her thoughts, and the presence of Selima and Abigail in the room helped her to feel as if she wasn’t talking entirely to herself. On the first evening that she was alone with them she did once speak directly to them about him, though not aloud. ‘He used to stand at the back door and call you in by name every evening before it got dark,’ she said to them in her thoughts. How anxious he would become if they did not return quickly, she remembered. His voice would rise till the whole hamlet must have heard it and perhaps laughed not very kindly about him and about those unusual names Selima and Abigail. He was afraid that the two cats might take to hunting together down by the river in the long grass where adders lurked. Or that they would ‘go feral’ and never come home to the house again. ‘Feral’ had been a favourite word of his ever since he had first read it in a boys’ magazine during his schooldays. He had never really outgrown his boyhood. He had not wanted to outgrow it, or to adapt himself fully to adult life. She had long realised, though never so keenly as she did now on her first evening alone in the room with Selima and Abigail, that this was a fault in him. He might still be

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